Heavy-machinery traffic impacts methane emissions as well as methanogen abundance and community structure in oxic forest soils.

ABSTRACT: Temperate forest soils are usually efficient sinks for the greenhouse gas methane, at least in the absence of significant amounts of methanogens. We demonstrate here that trafficking with heavy harvesting machines caused a large reduction in CH(4) consumption and even turned well-aerated forest soils into net methane sources. In addition to studying methane fluxes, we investigated the responses of methanogens after trafficking in two different forest sites. Trafficking generated wheel tracks with different impact (low, moderate, severe, and unaffected). We found that machine passes decreased the soils' macropore space and lowered hydraulic conductivities in wheel tracks. Severely compacted soils yielded high methanogenic abundance, as demonstrated by quantitative PCR analyses of methyl coe

SUBMITTER: Frey B 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3165404 | biostudies-literature | 2011 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature